Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.
Great, more slop
Well, if thanks to this we finally get open office to figure whatever tricks MS used to get documents to render fully correctly ONLY in office, consider me in.
Yeah, why would you waste time with these instead of Gimp, OpenOffice, etc? Except for the clicks.
i assume this person is making a statement more than anything. but gimp is not an adobe alternative. affinity is but not gimp. but since this is an open source commjnity i should point out affinity is not open source
You’ve obviously never used Photoshop or GIMP because if you have then you would immediately understand why. GIMP is a completely different experience, and its UX is far inferior to Photoshop. On top of that, anybody who is used to the workflow in Photoshop will have a very steep learning curve using GIMP.
Believe it or not, but most people just want a tool that works for what they’re trying to do. These apps have some bugs and rough edges still, but they’re very much usable and make it trivial to switch for anybody who’s used to Photoshop.
The venn diagram of what GIMP does and what Photoshop does isn’t the singular circle people assume. I, too, loathed my time with GIMP wondering how it ever got so popular in the OSS community, but then you realize it’s kind of all they have so of course they’ll support it no matter what.
I haven’t used it in years and based on that experience, I’m not rushing to try it again anytime soon. The UI felt like a UX designer’s prank on the world.
I’ve been using the recent versions of GIMP and it’s surprisingly usable. Of course tools are a bit different and in different places compared to Photoshop, but that goes for any software.
Yeah, you should definitely try using it again - especially since the big 3.0 release.
Menus and tool names/functions still do not map perfectly onto Photoshop’s (it is its own thing after all, so why should it?), but it is a serious and sophisticated piece of software. Easily adequate for my professional reproduction work.
I switched to it from Photoshop two or three years ago and had to spend a few hours watching tutorials and reading the manual to make the transition. But now there is hardly anything I can’t do in GIMP at least as fast, easily and reliably as I could in Photoshop.
Yeah, these are very different tools. And yeah UX in GIMP is something else.
Yeah, there are already good alternatives for the office package. I don’t see why anyone would use a slop version instead of them.
I can’t say anything about Photoshop and autodesk since I don’t use them.
Is OpenOffice still maintained?
The descendant of it called LibreOffice has been the well-maintained thing to use for the last 15 years.
about OpenOffice:
Sadly something called OpenOffice is also sort-of still maintained but should not be used under any circumstances. It has basically been a zombie project since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010 and (as the Apache OpenOffice wikipedia article explains) is not safe to use:
There is a somewhat complicated history about why the fork from the old
OpenOffice.orgto LibreOffice was necessary and how/why something else called “Apache OpenOffice” came to exist after the fork; the tldr is that Larry Ellison is a real-life comic book villain so his companies strive to do the worst thing possible at every turn.Yeah, I know about LibreOffice as I use it myself. That’s why I was wondering why OpenOffice was brought up.
I agree, then I remember those infuriating pricks asking “Can I draw a circle in GIMP yet?” in every thread about updates. The slop is for those people.
It’s very obviously better to have open tools than closed ones. This whole screeching about slop is both incredibly tiresome and irrational in the extreme. These are new tools that make software development easier, people are making useful things with them, and they’re helping people move off proprietary software. That’s obviously a net positive.
If you don’t like the tools people are using go ahead and make something comparable by hand, except we both know that you can’t. So, you’re adding nothing constructive to the discussion here.
LibreOffice?
For an office suite LibreOffice is fine, although compatibility with MS Office is still spotty. But for graphics there really aren’t drop in replacements for Adobe apps right now.
At the end of the day, I don’t really care what tools software is made with. Either it works well or it doesn’t. You can make quality projects using LLMs and you can make really shitty software without them. The deciding factor in both cases is skill ans knowledge of the developer building the app.
Have you seen anyone claiming that this brand-new vibe-coded thing has better compatibility (and/or feature parity) with the proprietary applications it claims to replace than the mature free software solutions currently do?
I would be surprised if it actually does anytime soon.
I agree, if it works well and it’s freely licensed it’s a good thing. It isn’t clear how well this actually works though, and the fact that the author is disparaging existing free software solutions to advertise his business selling genAI tokens is not a good indicator.
It’s made it so easy that there is currently a deluge new projects which often seem plausible at first but mostly turn out to actually be garbage upon closer inspection.
It’s irrational not to be skeptical of a two-week-old project claiming to be ready (or “almost” ready, lmao) to replace multiple 30-year-old suites of software.
Let me know if I’m mistaken, and anyone other than the author tries it and credibly claims that this thing is actually a better (in any way whatsoever) replacement for MS Office than LibreOffice is.
Given that people are literally just reverse engineering these applications by having the LLM decompile it and observe what it does in memory, yeah I expect these will be compatible much faster than manual efforts. I did something similar recently where I had an LLM figure out the proprietary format for the way my Nikon camera stores RAW files. There’s currently no open source implementation for it, and now I can read them using my own library. So, something that used to be a herculean effort before, is something you can now do in a few days using an LLM.
I haven’t played with the Office stuff, but I am using his PhotoCraft and LightCraft, and they work fine for what I need. I can process my photos using completely open source tools now that have a UX I’m used to. Yet, I’m aware that LightTable exists, and I’ve tried using it, and it was not a great experience. Given how fresh these projects are, it’s absolutely incredible to me. And with LLMs it’s possible for me to fix whatever issues I have with the app myself. The reality is that most people don’t really need to do anything incredibly complex with these tools. So, if they do what you need you have an app you can keep using indefinitely. The hard part has always been to build out the initial features and the UX which was just too hard to do by hand.
You’re saying this as if NPM ecosystem didn’t exist before LLMs. The reality is that there has always been a ton of garbage projects. Over time people gravitate towards projects that actually work and are useful to them. And this isn’t hard problem people keep making it out to be. You look at the number of stars a project has, how long it’s been developed, how many users it has, and so on. This gives you an idea of whether it has legs or not. I’ll certainly trade having to rely on proprietary software for the problem of having too many open source options.
Seems to me that the rational thing is to try the project, see if it does what you need and decide based on that. But that’s just me.
Have you seen the creators of this particular project claim anywhere that they decompiled anything? I’ve seen several commenters claiming that but I think they’re incorrectly assuming that that’s what they did.
For one thing, decompiling and recompiling Adobe or Microsoft code would surely be viewed as copyright infringement if there isn’t a clearly-documented “cleanrooming” process in the middle (having an LLM write a spec (in English) from the decompiled code, and having another session without access to the copyrighted code write new code from that spec - a fun LARP many people are doing lately).
But also, if they were actually doing that then I’d expect more feature parity than I’ve seen in the few youtube videos I’ve skimmed through showing these apps. I’m too lazy to find the link now but I watched one comparing PhotoCraft to Photoshop, and one example was that PhotoCraft’s Levels diagram is very primitive in comparison to Adobe’s (or to GIMP’s for that matter).
Congratulations, that’s awesome (and I don’t doubt it). But implementing a RAW format is a lot easier than re-implementing all of the Photoshop features which are required to be able to say (honestly, a least) “this has .PSD file format compatibility” without a long list of caveats.
I am curious how much you’ve actually used it. Eg, can you confirm what I saw on youtube showing the Levels adjustment dialog lacking most of the features found in Photoshop’s and GIMP’s? (Is that still the case in the current version?)
And have you noticed it having compatibility with (or at least some support for) any modern PSD file format features which GIMP lacks?
yes there was a lot of crap before 😭 but don’t you agree it’s 1000x worse now?
This project has a lot of stars but only because it just got a ton of clickbait press grossly exaggerating its completeness. I assume the vast majority of the stars are from people who have not tried running it. How long it’s been developed is… two weeks, as of today. How many users? It’s far too soon to say.
I agree with you here! But I’m assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that this particular one is not likely to ever become a particularly good option.
Given how close the project matches the original, I have a hard time imagining this could’ve been done without examining how the original functions. And whether it’s copyright infringement or not is of little interest to me since I view copyrights as being inherently harmful. However, since the implementation is using a different language, that does make the implementation itself a clean room one.
Ultimately, it’s a moot point whether they decompiled or wrote a spec from scratch though. What matters is that the apps work and it mimics what Adobe ones do sufficiently well to be useful.
And it still takes time to add features using LLMs. It’s not magic, and I’m more amazed how much they managed to add already rather than it not having parity yet.
Reimplementing Photoshop is obviously a much bigger effort, but I’m just using that as an illustration that LLMs are pretty good at reverse engineering work. Which makes it plausible to me that they could get a lot of the features figured out quickly.
I’m not a designer, so my needs are meagre. I want layers, to be able to select objects, add text, do color correction, and so on. Both GIMP and Photoshop are huge, so I haven’t had a chance to explore the depths. All I can say is that I was able to get the things I normally do without any real friction. It does appear to work with PSDs fairly well, but again I don’t have really complex ones because I use the tool in an amateur way to begin with.
What I can definitively say is that the UX is strictly superior to GIMP. Doing stuff like text manipulation like changing size or selecting fonts has always been a pain in GIMP, and as much as I want to like it, I find it painful to use. Photocraft apes Photoshop UX which I find to be superior. So, the feature parity isn’t really the stumbling point for me, it’s the UX.
But that’s my whole point here, most people are in the same boat as me. They do a few specific things with a tool, and if those things work then the tool solves the problem.
But this is something that’ll sort itself naturally over the coming months. If the developer stays active and continues working on it, then it’ll keep getting better. If they abandon it and move on then it’ll either die or somebody else picks it up. But it is in a fairly usable state as is from my experience, and I’d argue a lot of the hard work has already been done. So, we’ll have to just wait and see what happens with it.
Another point to mention though, is that it is becoming viable to maintain your own tools now. For example, if Photocraft got abandoned. It works well enough for me, and I could have an LLM fix any gaps in the way I’m using it. I don’t have to maintain a general tool that everyone can use, I can just have one that does what I need.
The barrier before was that you had to spend a lot of time to figure out how any one app works to make meaningful changes to it. And you only have so much time in a day, so you can’t really take ownership of a bunch of tools like that. But with LLMs it is becoming much more practical. Grab an open source app, adopt it to work the way you want, and just keep using it. If you ever need new features, you just have the LLM add them in for you.
And if we get to the point where all this stuff can be done using local models, then we really could see Stallman’s vision for GNU become a reality. Regular people, who aren’t developers, could use fully open source stacks, and they could modify software to work exactly the way they want. If we’re lucky this might kill closed source software entirely in the long run.
But from that perspective it would be much easier and more effective to simply use an LLM to make a crack for pirating the original software than to try to reimplement the whole thing. Or, to actually decompile and recompile it to get something (pirate-)source-available with actual feature parity. (People are also doing both of those things with various proprietary software, of course.)
That isn’t what “clean room” means in this context. It is widely accepted legal doctrine that direct ports of software from one language to another constitute derivative works under copyright law.
This project’s claim to be “open source” would be false if it is actually an automated port of the output of a decompiler of proprietary programs; that would make it warez.
Indeed. But if they haven’t gotten around to adding more than the most basic features in the Levels adjustment window (probably one of the most commonly used features of Photoshop) I assume they’re missing a lot of other stuff too.
OK, I’m taking that to mean that you haven’t actually identified any specific features (or PSD compatibilities) that PhotoCraft has over GIMP besides the UX? It seems to me like using an LLM to improve the UX of GIMP, on top of all of its existing (presumably far greater) set of features, would make a lot more sense.
I concur, in six months or a year I can either eat my words or say “I told you so” :)
I wouldn’t hold your breath, but perhaps with a lot more advances and if/when local models can perform coding tasks at reasonable speeds on affordable hardware… maybe? Meanwhile right now we’re drowning in new 1M LOC slop projects overpromising and underdelivering.
I don’t understand why anyone is interested in using these. They simply look like the real thing. There is nothing indicating they work remotely the same under the hood.
If you were to generate a bug for bug copy that would be one thing, this is just a doppelganger.
Were it made with Ai or not, its just not something that has any real value.
Decompilations do work the same under the hood.
I don’t think any decompiling was involved here; if it was, Adobe and Microsoft would have DMCA’d it off of github already.
Have you tried it to say that it just looks like the real thing and that it doesn’t work the same?
It isnt even written in the same language. It won’t be a bug for bug copy. Just slop.
I don’t need to buy the Temu knockoff to know it’ll be s shitty knockoff that looks good on the storefront.
Buy?
It’s a metaphor.
Ok